Most crime reporters leave a case when the verdict is read. A few never leave. They take the first call, sit through the trial, answer the phone when a detective retires, and are still the person a family or a task force rings when something moves thirty years later. What they keep is not only a file. It is the order in which things became known, and that order is a record of its own: what the papers got wrong in the first week, what a court barred them from printing, which tip arrived by telephone on a Sunday. The seven cases that follow track the people who stayed and the dates on which they came back.
Over 29 days in April and May 1992, a man walked into small shops in five cities in the middle of America and killed the people working there. Six died: Robin Fuldauer in Indianapolis, Patricia Magers and Patricia Smith in Wichita, Michael McCown in Terre Haute, Nancy Kitzmiller in St. Charles, Missouri, and Sarah Blessing in Raytown, Missouri. Most of the stores were near Interstate 70, or in Wichita’s case Interstate 35, which is where the press nickname comes from. Ballistics linked all six deaths to one firearm. Little money was taken, and police said none of the victims was sexually assaulted. Then the killings stopped. The man the press came to call the I-70 killer has never been identified, and no one has been charged. It is the police agencies that attribute the six deaths to one man.
Bob Cyphers, a reporter for KMOV in St. Louis, covered the Kitzmiller killing in 1992. Nearly thirty years later he was still on it. When a multi-agency task force led by the St. Charles police, with the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, reopened the case in late 2021, it invited him to follow its work as a reporter. He interviewed witnesses and relatives of the victims and looked for links to other cases, and KMOV ran a long series of his reports between January and April 2022. Captain Ray Floyd of the St. Charles police told KSDK that robbery could not have been the motive, since the killer took only about $100 across all the stores, and Cyphers told WGLT in 2024: "It’s the thrill of the kill for this guy."
What the long relationship gave the coverage was continuity. Cyphers reported the possible links that some investigators have considered: two killings and a nonfatal attack in Texas in 1993 and 1994, and a killing in Terre Haute in 2001. None is confirmed, and they stay possible links only. He reported on stored evidence, which went for modern DNA testing in 2022, and on a St. Charles detective who described a lead police had characterized as Number 1. Stations in the other cities did their own work. KWCH in Wichita returned to the case in 2019 and again in 2021, and in Wichita the case rests on a customer, the only man known to have met the killer face to face, whose description lies behind the sketch police still use. KMOV’s Chris Nagus reported the release of an age-enhanced version of that sketch.
Cyphers then wrote a book, Dead End: Inside the Hunt for the Interstate 70 Serial Killer, and in 2024 spoke about it in the cities where the killings happened. He told WGLT in March 2024 that police had identified a suspect who is alive. Police have not publicly named anyone. As of February 2024 a St. Charles detective was assigned to the case full time, a reward of $25,000 stood, and no arrest or charge had been reported. A Raytown business owner who grew up in the area asked KSHB that year, "How do you get over lives just being taken for no reason?"
In 1988 and 1989 at least eleven women with ties to New Bedford, a fishing city on the south coast of Massachusetts, were lost to their families. By April 1989 nine of them were dead, their deaths coming to light in towns around the city, among them Freetown, Dartmouth and Westport. The other two have never been located. Boston 25 News has described the case as possibly the largest unsolved murder case in New England. No one has been convicted.
Maureen Boyle was then a police and crime reporter for The Standard-Times of New Bedford, and she was the first to report that a serial killer appeared to be at work. She has said that she sensed a pattern in the summer of 1988 and that it became clear in November, after a third woman’s death came to light and a fourth followed soon after in Dartmouth. More came in quick succession. A former New Bedford detective, Richard Ferreira, who investigated one of the deaths with his partner and linked it to the other women, recalled saying, "I think we have a serial killer around here." He told CBS Boston in 2021 that it was the most difficult case he had ever worked. Boyle said later that no one grasped what was happening until the women began to turn up dead.
The press shaped the case after that, and one episode shows how. A grand jury began hearing evidence in March 1989. In 1990 a local lawyer, known by his initials, K.P., was indicted for one of the deaths. He called himself the victim of a witch hunt, and he counted 254 news articles that had linked him to the case before he was charged; in a 1990 interview with the Associated Press, reported by the ABA Journal, he said the indictment had ruined his legal career. The district attorney, then seeking a fourth term, faced a primary challenger who accused him of political motives, which he denied. In the summer of 1991 a special prosecutor cleared K.P. for lack of evidence and called the indictment "a fishing expedition." He remained the only person ever indicted. Debra Medeiros’s brother and daughter told a Boston television station that they never believed he was responsible, and they want to know who was.
Boyle stayed with the story. She wrote a book about the case, published in 2017 by the University Press of New England, and Boston 25 News’s Bob Ward, who covered the book’s release in September 2017 and May 2018, has returned to the case repeatedly; the station described the book as an effort to make sure the women, wives, mothers and daughters, are not forgotten. In 2016 the filmmakers Aaron Cadieux and David Grochmal, who spent about a year and a half researching the case for a documentary, told the same station that eleven families had lost members and wanted answers. Boyle told CBS Boston that the victims shared similar backgrounds. In 2025 Boston 25 News reported a tip that had reached one of the families, and Boyle said she had also passed on tips she received after her book was published. The families' own words carry the story now: Nancy Paiva’s daughter told Boston 25 News that she could not call her mother to talk about her day, and that there has to be somebody who saw something and knows something.
The newest turn came from a different case. A man convicted of a 1988 killing in Dartmouth died while seeking court-ordered DNA testing, and relatives of victims of the New Bedford murders joined the effort, arguing that a third person’s DNA could open a new line of inquiry. On February 27, 2026, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that an order for testing under the state’s post-conviction law does not expire automatically on a defendant’s death; the district attorney’s office said it would comply and had said it ruled out any connection between that case and the serial killings. The New Bedford case was open as of June 2026, when WBSM reported that the district attorney’s office had considered at least three men as suspects; only one was ever charged. Nothing publicly links the DNA ruling to a suspect.
John Justin Bunting led a small group of men in Adelaide’s northern suburbs who killed at least 11 people between August 1992 and May 1999. Most of the victims were relatives, friends or neighbors of the group. The deaths came to light in May 1999 at the town of Snowtown, about 140 kilometers north of Adelaide, where police investigating the case of one woman entered a disused bank in the town on May 20. Superintendent Paul Schramm told reporters it would not be possible to say accurately how many people had died until forensic testing was done. Bunting, Robert Wagner and Mark Haydon were arrested the day after, and James Vlassakis was taken into custody in June.
The reporters came a day later than the police. Anna Cock, then a crime reporter for The Advertiser, was sent to the town on Friday, May 21, after a tip-off, and by the time the media were taken inside, the evidence had been removed. Andrew McGarry, who covered the case for The Australian and later wrote about it for ABC News, described Bunting as a small man with no sense of smell whose jobs had included work at a crematorium in Queensland and at an abattoir in South Australia, and described the group as a kind of private "Thought Police" in the suburbs.
What marks this case in the record of reporting is not what was published but what could not be. Bunting and Wagner were tried together from October 16, 2002. On September 8, 2003, a jury convicted Bunting of 11 murders; the jury could not agree on a twelfth, the death of Suzanne Allen, and prosecutors did not seek a retrial. On October 29, 2003, Justice Brian Martin sentenced him to life on each count and declined to fix a non-parole period. At the sentencing, the ABC reported, Bunting kept his eyes away from the speakers and at one point sat reading a book. Haydon was tried separately and convicted of seven counts of assisting offenders, five by jury verdict and two by later guilty plea. Bunting appealed, representing himself, and the Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed the appeal on May 24, 2005. Evidence given in the 2002 trial, concerning David Johnson, stayed under a suppression order until September 19, 2005, when Justice Anthony Besanko lifted it. It was one of more than 200 suppression orders made in the Snowtown cases. Johnson’s father gave evidence at the trial and told reporters after the verdicts, "It’s been a horrible experience."
The suppression orders were still shaping coverage twenty years on. In February 2011 the ABC reported that families were upset by a film about the murders. In 2019 the ABC covered Wagner’s bid to have a non-parole period set, which the court refused on May 9. In February and May 2024 The New Daily and InDaily reported that Haydon was set for release under a supervision order. ABC reporters Rebecca Brice and James Wakelin published a long series in January and May 2024 on the sentence and on the families. And on May 19, 2026, the ABC reported that a suppression order covering Vlassakis, who had pleaded guilty to four murders in 2001, had lifted after 25 years; two days later it published his photograph and explained why the order had ended. On June 18 it reported that his release on parole was subject to further review. On September 15, 2026, AAP reported that the review, by a commissioner it named as David Cameron KC, had upheld the parole board, writing that Vlassakis "while a young man, came under the influence of Mr Bunting," whom he looked up to as a father figure. The New Daily reported his release on October 8, 2026. Bunting is serving life without parole.
Catherine Wood was a nurse’s aide at Alpine Manor, a nursing facility in Walker, Michigan, a suburb of Grand Rapids, when several elderly residents died there in the first months of 1987. The deaths were put down to natural causes. More than a year later her former husband went to the police with what she had told him: that she and a co-worker, Gwendolyn Graham, had killed patients. The Associated Press covered the first court documents in January 1989, describing Wood as a former nurse’s aide supervisor, 26, and Graham, then 25, as another aide at the facility.
Wood became the center of the case in two ways. Her statements were its starting point, and her testimony was the core of the prosecution of Graham. Under a plea agreement she pleaded guilty in 1989 to second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 to 40 years. Graham was convicted of first-degree murder in five deaths and sentenced to life without parole. Wood told the court that Graham did the killing while she kept watch or drew supervisors away; the Michigan Attorney General later wrote that Wood had admitted helping to kill at least five patients. Police in 1989 suspected as many as eight deaths, and reports in 2020 said investigators had come to fear the number could be as high as a dozen. No charges were ever brought for any deaths beyond the five.
The wire reporting returned thirty years later, when the parole board granted Wood parole on its ninth review, in 2018, after eight refusals. The victims' families went to court. On May 31, 2019, Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office published a statement headed "Parole Board Decision Puts Public Safety at Risk." The Associated Press reported on June 3, 2019, that Kent County Judge Joe Rossi heard arguments, with a lawyer defending the parole decision urging him to set aside "popular opinion"; Michigan Public wrote about the case ahead of the hearing. In October 2019 Rossi ruled that the board had not abused its discretion, and WGVU reported that investigators had said her cooperation was crucial to the prosecution of Graham.
Wood left prison on January 16, 2020, and moved to her sister’s house in Fort Mill, South Carolina. Ken Kolker, a Michigan television reporter who had covered the case for a newspaper thirty years earlier and had interviewed Wood in prison, traveled to Tallahassee, Florida, for her release and followed her to Fort Mill. Charlotte stations, WBTV, WSOC and WCNC, carried the story, as did ABC11. Reporters who went to the house were turned away, and Wood declined to speak. Neighbors told the stations they had not known she was moving in; some said she had paid her debt to society, and others said it was good that people now knew. A man who spoke for the family of one of the women, Mae Mason, said he was glad she would not be returning to West Michigan, and that if he were her neighbor he would want to know who had moved in. Her parole was due to end in June 2021.
Donato Bilancia, a thief and gambler from Genoa, was convicted of killing 17 people in Liguria and southern Piedmont in a little over six months, from October 1997 to April 1998, according to Italian press reports at his death; AFP reported that a Genoa court convicted him of 13 counts of murder in April 2000, and he was sentenced to 13 life terms plus 16 years for one attempted murder. His victims had almost nothing in common. For months, prosecutors in Genoa, Savona, Imperia, Sanremo and Alessandria each followed their own line of inquiry, and only the killings of women suggested a single killer, AGI reported. The criminologist Donato Lavorino told a Sicilian paper after his death that the investigations had been fragmented and that Bilancia could have been caught many months earlier. He was arrested in Genoa on May 6, 1998, and confessed within days. His first killing, in October 1997, had been recorded as a natural death until he named it himself.
Carlo Piano was a Genoa crime reporter at the time of the killings and covered the case for years. In 2023 Edizioni E/O published his book, Il torto: diciassette gradini verso l’inferno (The Wrong: Seventeen Steps Toward Hell), which AGI said he built on about 90,000 pages of trial documents. Doppiozero wrote that Piano met Bilancia at Marassi prison and later at Chiavari, and that the book opens with his death. The title comes from the killer’s own account: according to the trial papers, as AGI reported, Bilancia said that everything began with a wrong done to him by a friend who ran a gambling house. Piano told AGI that, as far as he knew, Bilancia had never hurt anyone before 1997.
Bilancia was moved from Marassi to the Due Palazzi prison in Padua and spent the rest of his life there. He died of Covid-19 there, and his death was reported on December 17, 2020, when he was 69. Piano told AGI that he learned Bilancia had refused treatment; Panorama, drawing on Piano, wrote that he refused a ventilator and a mask and said, "Someone like me has to die." Piano’s book was followed in 2024 by a novel from Alessandro Ceccherini, Che venga la notte, published by nottetempo, which tells the story from Bilancia’s point of view and mixes invented and real people, Doppiozero wrote. A television miniseries inspired by the case, Ultima pallottola, had aired on Canale 5 in 2003.
Charles Sobhraj was arrested in a Kathmandu casino in September 2003, a French citizen who had spent more than 20 years in Indian prisons and had lived in Paris since 1997. Nepali police charged him with murders in the Kathmandu Valley in December 1975: Connie Jo Bronzich, an American, and Laurent Carrière, a Canadian. A Kathmandu court convicted him of the Bronzich murder in 2004; it was upheld by the Patan Appellate Court in 2005 and by the Supreme Court on July 30, 2010, and a petition for review was turned down in December 2011, AFP reported. A second Nepali court convicted him of the Carrière murder in 2014. In the mid-1970s Thai police linked him to the deaths of young travelers around Bangkok and Pattaya, which police and reporters have tied to more than 20 deaths across Asia. He was never tried in Thailand. His biographers say he admitted at least 12 killings and later took the admissions back; he has said since that he never killed anyone.
The reporter most closely tied to the long story is John McBeth, a veteran Asia correspondent, whose Asia Times piece of February 2021 is titled as an effort to lay bare the fact and the fiction of the case. McBeth writes that in 1975 Sobhraj arrived in Bangkok with a Canadian girlfriend, Marie-Andrée Leclerc, and an Indian associate, Ajay Chowdhury, and that Alan Dawson, a former UPI correspondent who interviewed Sobhraj, told him that Sobhraj gave his motive as revenge against white people for enslaving Asians with drugs. He also records how Sobhraj and Leclerc read an Asiaweek cover story about the case while driving through Rawalpindi in August 1976 and were surprised at how much the police knew. After his July 1976 arrest in New Delhi, following the illness of a group of French tourists, the size of the group varies by account: more than 20 (AFP), a party of 22 (McBeth). What the reports of the charge say varies as well. AFP reported that Indian authorities convicted him of culpable homicide not amounting to murder and other charges; McBeth gives a 12-year sentence. In May 1982 an Indian court sentenced him to life for the 1976 murder of an Israeli tourist, Alan Jacob, and an appeal court acquitted him a year later for lack of evidence.
The local reporter’s story is smaller and sharper. In March 1986 Sobhraj escaped from Tihar jail in New Delhi, about two years before he was due to be released. He was free for about three weeks. On the evening of Sunday, April 6, 1986, a Mumbai police team led by Inspector Madhukar Zende arrested him in Goa. Camil Parkhe, then a crime reporter at The Navhind Times, told Outlook India that a reader telephoned him about unusual police activity near Porvorim; the police control room first told him all was well, and a second caller said the police had caught a big fish. Sobhraj was driven to Mumbai in a convoy of private taxis, and the Navhind Times ran the story across eight columns the next day. Nearly forty years later, in September 2025, Scroll reviewed Inspector Zende, a film about the hunt for a career criminal, as a cartoonish caper.
Sobhraj’s later years went through the courts and the wires. Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered his release on December 21, 2022, applying the 75 percent remission for prisoners over 65, and he was released on December 23, deported to France that evening and barred from Nepal for ten years, The Kathmandu Post and The Himalayan Times reported. In August 2023 Al Jazeera interviewed him in Paris; he said he was planning lawsuits, and he has denied all of the killings. The long record on him is a patchwork of agency and newspaper copy describing the same events in slightly different terms, and the Indian convictions are where the accounts differ most.
Max Gufler sold washing machines and vacuum cleaners from St. Pölten, the main town of Lower Austria, in the 1950s. A Vienna jury convicted him in 1961 of four murders and two attempted murders and sentenced him to life imprisonment; he had been charged with seven. The Austrian press called him Blaubart, Bluebeard, and in St. Pölten he is remembered by that name. He denied the killings to the end and died in Stein prison in 1966.
The press was part of the story from the first month. Gufler was questioned in St. Pölten on October 31, 1958, and arrested on November 2. On November 18 the Vienna daily Neues Österreich reported that he had been allowed to read about his own case. Officials said a detective shared his cell to watch him. In a question to the justice minister on November 20, deputies of the Nationalrat wrote that the cellmate was in fact a prisoner held for a minor offense who had permission to read newspapers, and that Gufler had read a long report on the investigation, after which he partly withdrew his confessions. The minister, Tschadek, answered on November 21 that Gufler had made a will soon after his arrest, pointing to thoughts of suicide, and had therefore been placed with a second prisoner; that of the two publications he saw one had nothing on the case and the other a short report of his arrest; and that there was no "justice scandal."
The coverage returned over the decades. Doris Plank covered the case for ORF’s documentary series Tat-Sachen in 2004. In 2023 the crime reporter Fernando del Rio wrote about Gufler for the Mar del Plata paper La Capital, reporting that investigators suspected him of 18 killings, a figure that was not proved in court. ORF Lower Austria returned to the case in May 2024 in a piece by Doris Henninger. The St. Pölten magazine MFG, in a 2025 article by Johannes Reichl, called it one of the largest criminal cases of Austria’s Second Republic. Alfred Anzeletti, later president of the regional court, told MFG that there were jokes about Gufler in St. Pölten and that children played "Gufler" in their games.
A long-serving reporter is a source of a particular kind. Cyphers, Boyle, McGarry and Piano carry details from the early days of their cases that nobody else can supply, and the newspapers of the first weeks preserve what was believed before the courts spoke. The results differ with the case. In New Bedford and along the I-70 corridor the reporters are still working because no court has ruled. In Adelaide the coverage waited for suppression orders to lift, the last of them in 2026. In Genoa the book came 25 years after the arrest, in Michigan the wire copy returned for the parole hearings, and in Austria the case came back to print in 1958, 2004, 2023, 2024 and 2025. For Sobhraj the difficulty runs the other way: so many agencies have covered him that the accounts diverge on the basic outcome of the Indian cases, and a local reporter’s recollection of one Sunday in Goa is among the clearest testimony in the file.
• 1952 to 1958: killings attributed to Max Gufler; questioned in St. Pölten October 31, 1958, arrested November 2; Neues Österreich reports on his cell on November 18; the deputies' question follows on November 20 and the minister’s reply on November 21.
• 1961: A Vienna jury convicts Gufler of four murders and two attempted murders. 1966: he dies in Stein prison.
• July 1976: Charles Sobhraj is arrested in New Delhi after a group of French tourists falls ill; May 1982: life sentence for the murder of Alan Jacob, overturned in 1983.
• March 1986: Sobhraj escapes from Tihar jail; April 6, 1986: recaptured in Goa; The Navhind Times runs the story across eight columns the next day.
• 1987: Elderly residents die at Alpine Manor, Walker, Michigan. January 1989: The Associated Press reports on court documents; 1989: Catherine Wood pleads guilty.
• 1988: the New Bedford series begins; November 1988: Maureen Boyle reports that a serial killer appears to be at work; March 1989: a grand jury begins hearing evidence; 1990: a lawyer is indicted; summer 1991: the charge is dropped.
• April 8 to May 7, 1992: six people are killed in five cities in the I-70 case; Bob Cyphers covers the St. Charles killing.
• October 1997 to April 1998: the killings for which Donato Bilancia is convicted; May 6, 1998: his arrest in Genoa.
• May 20 and 21, 1999: Snowtown; Anna Cock is sent to the town after a tip-off.
• September 2003: Sobhraj is arrested in Kathmandu; September 8, 2003: Bunting is convicted of 11 murders; October 29, 2003: life with no non-parole period.
• 2004: Sobhraj is convicted of the Bronzich murder; May 24, 2005: Bunting’s appeal is dismissed; September 19, 2005: a suppression order is lifted.
• July 30, 2010: Nepal’s Supreme Court upholds the Bronzich conviction. 2014: Sobhraj is convicted of the Carrière murder.
• 2017: Boyle’s book is published. 2018: Wood is granted parole; October 2019: Judge Rossi upholds the decision; January 16, 2020: Wood is released.
• December 17, 2020: Bilancia’s death is reported.
• Late 2021: the I-70 task force reopens the case; January to April 2022: KMOV runs Cyphers’s series.
• December 21 to 23, 2022: Sobhraj is ordered freed and deported to France.
• 2023: Carlo Piano’s Il torto is published. March 2024: Cyphers speaks to WGLT.
• February 27, 2026: Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules on DNA testing. May 19, 2026: Vlassakis’s suppression order lifts; September 15, 2026: review upholds parole; October 8, 2026: his release is reported.